4

Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus and

the Logic of Practice
Joseph Margolis
There are too many convergences and specific differences between
Pierre Bourdieu's account of societal life and my own to permit me to
address his theory without providing a sense of how to approach the
issues we share. In the interests of candor risking good manners,
however, I must mention, briefly, certain initial convictions we seem
to share but construe differentl}', and then turn at once to Bourdieu's
views.
I find the following three intuitions particularly apt in the analysis
of "the human condition": first, that the observers and the observeds
of the human world are one and the same; second, that neither is
altogether what it seems to be in spontaneous individual reflection;
third, that the relationship between our perceiving the natural world
and the world's being correctly perceived is an analogue of (human)
self-knowledge. I see no reason to resist replacing these naive intui-
tions in good time. Still, in their crudity - perhaps more clearly thus
than otherwise - unacceptable alternatives are instantly exposed as
unpromising. Certain very strong styles of analysis go contrary to
their implied instruction.
If we confine ourselves to Anglo-American and French philosoph-
ical practices, then, among the first, we should have to discount all
versions of positivism and the unity of science program; and, among
the second, all versions of Sartrean existentialism and Saussurean
structuralism. Bourdieu is clearly attracted to such economies. !\01y
sense is that the options that remain cleave to two principal themes:
one, that human thinking and action are, inherently, manifestations of
history; the other, that, as historied processes, however individuated
in the lives of particular selves, they are effective because their powers
Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus and the Logic of Practice 65
are structured by, and incorporate, the enabling collective powers of
the forms of life of which they are manifestations.
The economy of beginning thus is too cr},ptic to be entirely trusted.
I think Bourdieu is generally hospitable to these five themes, that is,
including the two corollaries just mentioned.
1
I am committed to
them.
Bourdieu departs from them, somewhat, in a certain charac-
teristic way. When we espy the telltale signs in what he writes, we
begin to grasp the force and limitation of his investigations and
explanatory practices. Bourdieu finally adheres, I think, to a certain
foundational view of how the oppositional role of the sexes generates
universally - the historically variable structures of different
societies. I take that line of speculation to be doubtful - much thinner
than any we should rely on and contrary in spirit to a strong
historicism.
Bourdieu says, quite characteristically: "A vision of the world is a
division of the world, based on a fundamental principle of division
which distributes all the things of the world into two complementary
classes. To bring order is to bring division, to divide the universe into
opposing entities, those that the primitive speculation of the Pytha-
goreans presented in the form of 'columns of contraries' (sustoi-
chiai) .... The cultural act par excellence is the one that traces the
line that produces a separated delimited space.,,2 To oversimplify for
the moment, I suggest that Bourdieu escapes both structuralism (I...evi-
Strauss's, since his own empirical work has been in the ethnology or
anthropology of Algeria and southeastern France) and existentialism
(Sartre's, given his own personal history) - by way of insisting on
three essential themes: (0) that human agents are not mere subjects
(automatically following rules or autonomously exercising existential
freedom); (b) that actions are not to be understood in terms of
"obedience to a rule" but rather in terms of exploiting real possib-
ilities and realistic strategies;3 and a third theme (c) that needs still to
be defined.
Already in Outline of a Theor,' of Practice, Bourdieu brings
together his parallel objections to Levi-Strauss and Sartre. Against
Levi-Strauss, he says:
In order to escape the realism of the structure, which hypostatizes systems of
objective relations by converting them into totalities already constituted
outside of individual history and group history, it is necessary to pass from
the opus operatum to the modus operandi, from statistical regularity or
algebraic structure to the principle of the production of this observed order,4
and, against Sartre, just two pages on, he adds:
66
Joseph Margolis
If the world of action is nothing other than his [Sartre's] universe of inter-
changeable possibles, entirely dependent on the decrees of the consciousness
\ .... hich creates it and hence totally devoid of objectiuity, if it is moving because
the subject chooses to be moved, revolting because he chooses to be revolted,
then emotions, passions, and actions are merely games of bad faith, sad
farces in which one is both bad actor and good audience.
s
These remarks fix the last theme wanted, namely, (c) that an objective
human science must address the real practices of the members of a
society - in which there cannot be a disjunction between the powers
of individual agents and the empowering processes of the social world
in which they live and act, and which do not take the form of
instantiating constitutive rules.
I take (a) (c) to be as clear and straightforward a set of clues
about Bourdieu's sociology-cum-philosophy as any that may be given,
and I support them. They explicate Bourdieu's sense of the false
"objectivity" of the hidden structures the structuralists insisted on,
as well as the false "reality" of a Sartrean consciousness detached
from the world it practices on. They place Bourdieu correctly, if I may
speak thus. Bur what their explication shows is that, although
Bourdieu finally rejects the fictions of structuralism, he docs not
adopt the same stance against binarism (which, of course, structural-
ism insists on).
The truth is, Bourdieu allows himself (I believe) to be tricked by an
equivocation symptomatic of his entire oeuvre. For, although it is true
that predication is oppositional, it is (and should be) an empirical
matter as to whether the ordered predicates that best serve explana-
tion in the human sciences are binary. I hardly think they are, and
Bourdieu's own studies, for example regarding the marriage practices
among the Berbers, tend to show that the binary "rules" of kinship
plainly give way to the diverse "strategies" of marriage.
6
Still, Bourdieu appears (to me) to insist on binarism. It is the
explicit inflexibility of the structuralist's use, not the supposed valid-
ity, of a foundational binarism that Bourdieu opposes. He does not
really oppose the latter. Let me offer this as a provisional finding. If it
requires adjustment, I shall certainly allow whatever qualifications
will be needed. But there cannot be any serious doubt about
Bourdieu's inclination to favor binarism in a way that generates
structuralist societies. This is surely what he means in remarking
that "non-literate societies seem to have a particular bent for the
structural games which fascinate the anthropologist" - he has
the Kabyle and related peoples in mind.
7
But he is also tempted -
the term may he too weak - to apply hinarism to modern societies,
where there is an "overlay" of variable and labile structures that
Pierre Bourdleu: Habitus and the Logic of Practice 67
obscure the would-be underlying binarism and misleadingly put its
proper foundational function in considerable doubt. Thus he says:
"Psychoanalysis, a disenchanting product of the disenchantment of
the world, which tends to constitute as such a mythically overdeter-
mined area of signification, too easily obscures the fact that one's own
body and other people's bodies are always perceived through cate-
gories of perception which it would be naive to treat as sexual, even
if ... these categories always relate back, sometimes very concretely,
to the 0J'position between the biological defined properties of the two
sexes." I think this is meant to be a binarism that constrains the
contingencies of cultural history.
Let me leave it at that for the moment. tv!y reason for pressing the
point is that the habitus is never really segregated (in Bourdieu's mind)
from this universal generative structuralism, and that the linkage
helps to explain Bourdieu's sense of the microprocesses of social
functioning. I, on the other hand, claim that the binarism cannot be
convincingly sustained in its universal (or modal) form; that it applies,
empirically, only piecemeal, to strongly traditionalist and preliterate
cultures; and, most important, that it violates the deeper historicity of
the human condition itself (which Bourdieu seems very often to
favor). The issue is as ancient as Presocratic philosophy - which
Bourdieu himself signals.
Bourdieu risks his entire sociology on the adequacy of "gender"
oppositions, which he intends at least metonymically. But neither
gender nor sex - the one, for social and ideological reasons, the
other, for biological reasons
9
- can be convincingly so construed.
His own studies should have made this plain. The insistence is not
so much a return to an old structuralism as it is a weakness regarding
historicity, determinism, the requirements of objectivity and realism,
and, ultimately, the relationship between body and mind. My concern
is this: one cannot displace structuralist rules by improvisational
strategies (within the practice of effective action) without also repla-
cing a binarism of descriptive and explanatory categories by an open-
ended diversity of evolving social strategies. To endorse the one and
resist the other is profoundly inconsistent. The" 'Fieldwork in Philo-
sophy'" interview seems to be congruent with these notions, but other
strands of Bourdieu's thought are more difficulr to reconcile with
what he says (in the interview) and (frankly) with what I would
favor for quite different reasons. I'm certain that part of the conver-
gences between our views is due to our having been equally impressed
with Wittgcnstein's notion of the Lebensform and Marx's "Theses on
Feuerbach." The difference between us lies with the treatment of
history and the flux.
68 Joseph a r g ~
II
Bourdieu's binarism merely alerts us to deeper difficulties - those in
particular that have to do with the meaning of the habitus and,
ultimately, with the treatment of the relationship between mind
and body. There is a certain slacknes.'i in Bourdieu's analysis of the
habitus, though it is very good as a general schema. Where it goes
wrong, or begins to lose its surefootedness, may be guessed from his
own explicative images. (If I am mistaken in this, I should be happy to
recant.)
Let me cite two carefully phrased passages about the habitus that I
find at once marvelously suggestive and distinctly worrisome. In one,
Bourdieu says:
Prat:tical belief is not a "!.1ate of mind," still less a kind of arbitrary adherent:e
to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines ("heliefs "J, hut rather a state of the
body. Doxa is the relationship of immediate adherence that is established in
practice between a habitus and the field to \vhich it is attuned, the pre-verbal
taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense.
The second remark, only a few lines away, goes on to say:
Practical sense, social necessity turned into nature, convened into motor
schemes and body automatisms, is what causes practices, in and through
what makes them obscure to the eyes of their producers, to be sensible, that is
informed by a common sense. It is because agents never know completely
what they are doing that what they do has more sense than they know.
Every social order systematically takes advantage of the disposition of the
body and language to function as depositories of deferred thoughts that can
he triggered off at a distance in space and time hy the simple effect of
replacing the body in an overall posture which recalls the associated thoughts
and feelings, in one of the inductive states of the \XxIy which, as actors know,
give rise to states of mind 10
My diagnosis runs as follows. What Bourdieu says conveys a sense of
the spontaneous activity of speech and behavior in ordinary human
life. This is perhaps what "motor schemes" and "body automatisms"
mean. But the image cannot be right if we are supposed to understand
the particular utterances and acts that instantiate the habitus "by a
common sense" (as Bourdieu puts it). Either it does not address the
right issue or it is the wrong image.
These are provocative charges: I must show them to be fair com-
plaints. The passages cited remind us, of course, of the remarkable
fluency of the improvisational play of ordinary human life. Bourdieu
is fond of reminding us of that: it's essential to the theme of the
Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus and the LogIC of Practice 69
habitus. Partly, I believe, it confirms the intrinsic failure of Levi-
Strauss's and 'Sartre's alternative visions of a human science; and,
pardy, it confirms the need to insist that a valid theory must center
on [he features of the habitus itself. So much is reasonahle and well
worth emphasizing. But if we ask what the habitus is, what the telling
features of its functioning structures are, what we get from Bourdieuj
is a kind of holist characterization that never comes to terms with itsl
operative suhstructures. For, consider that the spontaneous play of;
ordinary life is not like an actor's performance: the actor's skilled'
"inductions" (in Bourdieu's image) are triggered by a finished and
fantiliar script; whereas (to continue the image) the ordinary human ;
agent (in "acting his part") creates a fresh script nearl}' always and J
continually. !
The nagging impression I have is that the image of the actor is the
one Bourdieu wants. It's the key to his brand of structuralism. Recall,
for instance, that, in his critique of Levi-Strauss's absurd account of
the exchange of gifts, Bourdieu astutely remarks: "the [structuralist]
model which shows the interdependence of gift and counter-gift
destroys the practical logic of exchange, which can only function if
the ohjective model (every gift requ,ires a counter-gift) is not experi-
enced as such. And this misconstrual of the model is possible [he says]
because the temporal structure of exchange (the counter-gift is not
only different, but deferred) masks or contradicts the objective struc-
ture of exchange."ll
What Bourdieu is very good at providing are non-structuralist
(non-algorithmic) analyses of structuralist puzzle-cases. To use his
own idiom: he supplies a modus opermtdi for an opus operatum;
whereas what he needs (pursuing his example) is an open process in
which the gift that will be given is not yet, in the very process, telically
obliged - "doomed" - to be a gift! I fear that when he treats the
habitus globally, he treats it in a genuinely openended way hut
does not then identify its microstructure; and when he gives us a
due about its substructure, he reverts to the structuralist orientation
but not to its failed theory. (He appeals to "strategies" but not to
"rules," to binarism but not to formalism.) That is what I gather
from his having remarked that the counter-gift is "deferred." Of
course it is, but that's why it cannot capture the work of the habitus
- if, that is, the habitus is meant to be the ubiquitous feature of
ordinary life. It may be that, here and there, there arc highl" ritualized
forms of life - life around the Kahyle house, for instance
11
- that are \
best construed as a continually re-enacted script, but that cannot
pos.'iihlr he the exemplar of post-traditional modern society.u Or,
so I claim. .
70 Joseph Margolis
If you grant the force of saying this, you should begin to worry
about Bourdieu's treatment of body and mind. I agree that it is the
bodily aspect of an act that makes it "sensible," robust enough to be
perceived at all. But I cannot agree with Bourdieu's pointed comment
that "practical belief is not a 'state of mind' ... but rather a state of the
body." Doubtless, he says this in part to distance himself rhetorically
from Levi-Strauss and Sartre. But the fact is, the habitus is meant to
overcome the disjunction benveen mind and body - within the
dynamics of a puhlic culture. That now generates a puzzle we have
not yet acknowledged. How, we may ask, do "hody automatisms"
work? Either Bourdieu fails to say, or, if he does explain, his clue
cannot serve.
It's true he adds the following
Althusser:
against Levi-Strauss and
I wanted ... to reintroduce agents that Levi-Strauss and the structuralists,
among others, Althusser, tended to abolish, making them into simple epiphe-
nomena of structure .... 1 am talking about dispositions acquired through
experience, thus variable from place to place and time to time. [Bourdieu
means that he is attracted to Chomsky'S universalism but is not talking about
innate dispositions.) This "feel for the game," as we call it, is what enables an
infinite number of "moves" to be made, adapted to the infinite number of
possible situations which no rule, however complex, can foresee. And,
I replaced the rules of kinship [in the example given) with matrimonial
strategies. 14
But, if what I've said is reasonably correct, then the "feel for the
game" can't capture the (full range of the) habitus. Bourdieu never
questions the notion of a "move"; he questions only the adequacy of
structuralistic rules for explaining the infinite variety of "moves" or
(as with the counter-gift) why we should hold to "rules" and not to
"strategies." I agree that "strategies" are better than rules, but they
won't do either.
At the risk of insisting too pointedly then, let me show you why. I
want to say that Bourdieu is entirely right in his global use of habitus
or hexis, and entirely wrong in his detailed reading of his own model.
"Adopting a phrase of Proust's," he says, "one might say that arms
and legs are full of numb imperatives. One could endlessly enumerate
the values given body, made body, by the hidden persuasion of an
implicit pedagogy which can make a whole cosmology, through
injunctions as insignificant as 'sit up straight' or 'don't hold your
knife in your left hand'," This is exactly right and beautifully put.
But it goes wrong at once: "The logic of scheme transfer (Bourdieu
goes on] which makes each technique of the body a kind of pars
Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus and the Logic of Practice
71
tot a/is, predisposed to function in accordance with the fallacy of pars
pro toto, and hence to recall the whole system to which it belongs,
gives a general scope to the apparently most circumscribed and cir-
cumstantial observances. The cunning of pedagogic reason lies pre-
cisely in the fact that it manages to extort what is essential while
seeming to demand the insignificant .... Bodily hexis is political
mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition,
a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling
and thinking."l S
There are two weaknesses lurking here, neither entirely explicit,
sometimes even opposed: one, the presumption that there is a totality
(a system) of some kind (open or closed) that each act or disposition
to act "recalls," subtends, perhaps in some way signifies; the
other, the presumption that that alone accounts for the fluency of
our acts and dispositions and, therefore, the privilege assigned the
body.
I say that there is no evidence at all that ordinary life is a system of
any kind. It is true that Wittgenstein speaks of a form of life as a
"system," but Wittgenstein means to emphasize the improvisational
continuity of an openended practice in v.,hich neither "rules" nor
"strategies" could yield sufficient c1osure.
16
(Bourdieu is drawn to
Wittgenstein.) Perhaps the Zuni once approximated a closed society
devoted to the magical repetition of their particular form of life (as
described by Ruth Benedict);17 but, as I say, it is a model that cannot
possibly be convincing in the modern world.
I think it is just Bourdieu's adherence to this subtler structuralism
that explains hath his attraction to the importance of the supposed
binarism of gender and to the faulty metaphor of mind and body.
"The opposition hetween male and female is realized in posture, Ihe
says,] in the gestures and movements of the body, in the form of the
opposition between the straight and the bent, between firmness,
uprightness and directness ... and restraint, reserve and flexibil-
ity ... these two relations to the body are charged with two relations
to other people, time and the world, and through these, to two
systems of value." 1 II I realize that Bourdieu has the Kabyle in mind;
but does he mean that binarism works in their world but not in ours;
or does he mean that ours, like theirs, is a "system" for which, though
structuralist "rules" will not do, more flexible "strategies" will? The
latter reading seems more likely.
If the "Belief and the Body" paper is a reliable clue, then Bourdieu
cannot be but read as a subtler advocate of structuralism and
binarism. Keep that in mind as a possibility: the binary division of
labor between the sexes in the Kabyle world is not in any sense a
72
Joseph Margolis
confirmation of binarism in that or any other world; and the validity
of binarism in the Kabyle world poses a puzzle that cannot be dis-
joined from the fate of any would-be objective account of the life of
any society.
III
Let me come at this from an altogether different direction. Consider
two very large philosophical questions that any model of Bourdieu's
sort must ultimately address: (a) that of the ontic relation bet\veen
culture and physical nature and the distinctive properties of the
cultural world; (b) that of the epistemic problem of predication, of
"real generality," of the spontaneous extension of general predicates
to instances that are not first learned as the exemplars of their accept-
able usc. For brevity's sake, let me say that my own resolution of (a)
accords with the items of my original tally (which Bourdieu would
probably not oppose); and, regarding (b), the resolution I offer rejects
all versions of the theory of "universals" (as utterly hopeless and
beside the point) and locates the solution in the consensual (but not
criterial) practices of historicized Lebensformen.
19
I don't believe
Bourdieu would agree to this.
My complaint amounts to this: regarding (a), the rhetorical dis-
junction between mind and body, which bears on the generative
binarism of the sexes, cannot, on my view, possibly accommodate
the distinction between the natural and the cultural or Bourdieu's own
insistence on overcoming "dualism";20 and, regarding (b), there;s no
structured or algorithmic way to ensure a resolution, among the apt
members of any historicized society, of the problem of objective
predication that would entrench (cognitively or "practically") the
generative binarism of the sexes or any substitute, whether hiological
or cultural. The resolution of (a) admits the importance of the physi-
cal embodiment of cultural life and behavior, but not anything like the
semiotics of the body - except metonymically, assigned in a subaltern
way from the vantage of the emergent (em-bodied) culture. And the
resolution of (b) requires, everywhere, the reidentification of predica-
tive similarities - a fortiori, structural similarities - within the con-
sensual practices of a particular Lebensform (within some society'S
form of life, or, more accurately, within some society'S form of life as
observed by us observing our doing just that).
There is no way of overcoming the dualism of mind and body or of
nature and culture except by construing the "mental" and the
"cultural" predicatively; and, there is no way of doing that except
Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus and the Logic of Practice 73
by construing the entities to v.'hich the relevant predicables are
ascribed as suitably emergent with respect to physical nature and
indissolubly "embodied" as the complex entities they are,21 This
affords the only viable strategy for resolving (a), short of embracing
some form of physicalism. Bourdieu has no interest in supporting
physicalism. But if one proceeds thus, it is at least problematic -
impossible, I should say, for reasons that will soon appear - that the
categorization or description of any culture should privilege the move-
ments or dispositions of the bod)'. The body is implicated, of course, in
every socially significant act or disposition but not separably from the
significative. Otherwise, only a version of ""hat has come to be called
"supervenience" (or "nonreductive physicalism") could possibly vin-
dicate Bourdieu's metaphor. As I see matters, this is precisely what is
risked in structuralism and what is resolved (if indeed it is resolved),
however inchoately, in Hegelian, Marxist, Foucauldian, and feminist
accounts. Once you admit culture and history and the encultured
competence of human selves, you cannot denv that, ultimately, "mate-
riality" and "signification" are inseparable.
21
I insist that Bourdieu's intention must have been metaphoric (when
he declared that "practical belief is not a 'state of mind' ... but rather
a state of the body"): if he had meant it literally, his entire theory
would have collapsed at once, on the assumption (which he evidently
shares) that the cultural cannot be reduced to the physical or treated
as "supervenient,,;23 and if he meant it figuratively, then the formula
could not but be profoundly incomplete. There is no conceptual
reason why supervenience should not be false, and there is no empir-
ical reason to believe it is true. 24
If you grant the argument, a graver difficulty begins to surface.
There is, first of al1, something of a suggestion of extensional equival-
ence between the cultural and the physical, in Bourdieu, in addition to
the standard structuralist equivalences he wishes to construe in terms
of "strategies" rather than "rules." For he explicitly says:
When the properties and movements of the body are socially qualified, the
most fundamental social choices are naturalized and the body, within its
properties and its movements, is constituted as an analogical operator estab-
lishing all kinds of practical equivalences among the different divisions of the
social world - divisions between the sexes, between the age groups and
between the social classes - or, more precisely, among the meanings and
values associated with the individuals occupying ptactically equivalent posi-
tions in the spaces defined by these divisions.
1s
There is certainly no way to support this thesis either in a modal or
contingently universal sense. There may be societies that exhibit such
74 Joseph
extraordinary correspondences, but they could not behave in any
significantly historicized way.
What Bourdieu adds leads to the quite remarkable thesis that he
puts this way: "The relation lof social distinctions] to the body is a
fundamental dimension of the habitus that is inseparable from a
relation to language and to time ... Social psychology is mistaken
when it locates the dialectic of incorporation at the level of repres-
entation, with body image .... What is 'learned by body' is not some-
thing that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but
something that one is:,26 Perhaps; but this touches only on the
fluency of naturally acquired habits of life. It has nothing to do with
binarism or correspondence or supervenience or structuralist systems
or "practical belief." It makes a mystery of the enculturing process,
and it enlists us ingeniously into supporting Bourdieu's own structur-
alism. What is the "analogical operator" after all? In the" 'Fieldwork
in Philosophy'" paper, Bourdieu warns us to pay attention to "the
historicization of lour] concepts," warning against premature fixities
that "hinder and imprison thought."27 Why should we not turn the
warning against Bourdieu's own binarism?
Furthermore, "what is 'learned by body'" is confirmed, shaped and
endorsed, legitimated, by the collective. consensual practices of an
encompassing Lebensform: it cannot be shown to be valid simply as
the spontaneous responsiveness of an individual "body." The "know-
ledge" assigned the body lies in its spontaneity and fluency all right;
but its fluency is what is consensually so judged. and what is so judged
is the cultural alJtness of the relevant properties of what we do and
make and judge relative to an evolving Lebensform. The fluency
belongs to the individual agent or "body"; but its cognitive aptness
is a function of the wayan agent shares the practices of an encom-
passing society. There are no predicative rules or strategies for indi-
vidual agents to internalize, or what mles or strategies there are are
parasitic on these deeper enabling powers. There is nothing funda-
mental in being culturally apt that could be governed by an internal
"analogical operator." The "operation" in question is inseparable
from the ongoing consensual coherence of the aggregated behavior
of the members of a viable society. Bourdieu's formula does not define
the "logic" of predication - it therefore fails to define the "logic of
practice." Predication is not an "analytical operator" internal to any
or all of us. There is no such thing. J take this to be the principal
distinction between Bourdieu and Wittgenstein on the matter of
Lebensform and habitus.
This brings me to problem (b) and its connection with (a). Two
themes are needed. For one thing, the "cultural" is a blunderbuss
75
notion. I call the mark of the cultural the "Intentional" and collect
under it an endlessly varied assortment of predicables concerned with
meaning, significance, signification, srmbolic import, semiotic
import, language, representationalit}', expressivity, referentialit}',
truth, metaphor, rhetoric, style, genre, purpose, historicity, institu-
tions, practices, habits, traditions, rules, and the like.
28
The Inten-
tional incorporates the "intentional" (of Brentano and Husserl) and
the "intensional" (the non-extensional), but it goes beyond those
notions in being ascribed primarily to instantiations of the collective
life of a society (as the other notions are not) - to whatever rightly
falls within a Lebensform. The slightest reflection on the "Inten-
tional" pretty clearly shows that the human sciences must treat it as
sui generis.
Now then, the second theme affects the methodological fortunes of
the Intentional as well as the natural or physical. For, if, as I have
suggested, the valid predication of general attributes is a function of
the consensual practices of a historical society, if the Intentional is sui
ge1ler;s, if the consensual use of general terms affects discourse about
the phrsical world as well as the cultural, then there can be verr little
reason to suppose that there is an "analogical operator" (interior to
the "body") that functions to ensure binarism or, more specifically, the
generative function of the "opposed" sexes and a sense of the infinitely
many "moves" of the social "game" in accord with some such gen-
erative binarism.
Bourdieu has very little to say about classificatory practices, except
to fall back to some version of the "logic of practice" of the sort
already mentioned.
29
More than that, there is no principled distinc-
tion between the "folk" competence of basic predicative discourse and
its professionalization; there is only a difference between the various
societies whose Lebensformen are invoked.
JU
IV
I have been contesting Bourdieu's theory of practice, primarily
because I agree with his general sense of the dynamics of social life.
I draw back at two points. For one thing, I detect in his own discourse
the vestiges of canonical structuralism and an existential phenomeno-
logy, despite his effective escape. At any rate, I cannot be sure how
strongly entrenched his hinarism is, or ultimately how different his
"strategies" are from structuralist "rules." For a second, I cannot find
in Bourdieu a sustained and frontal account of the cognitive aspect of
the "logic of practice." My sense is that he abandons the first, though,
76 Joseph Margolis
if he does, 1 cannot see that he could then hold on for long to the
universalism that seemed to surface in his admitted attraction to
Chomsky's views (with the qualification already acknowledged). On
the other hand, I find that Bourdieu admits the point in a forthright
way - correctly, if I may intrude my assessment. For, in answering the
interviewer's question about a comparison with Habermas's insist-
ence on "universal norms," Bourdieu explicitly says: "I have a tend-
ency to ask the problem of reason or of norms in a reasonably
historicist way. Instead of wondering about the existence of 'universal
interests', I will ask: who has an interest in the universal? .. I think
historicism must be pushed to its limit, by a sort of radical doubt, to
see what can really be saved. ,,31 Clearly, a strict binarism would be
incompatible with this concession. My own formulation is very simi-
lar to Bourdieu's: historicism and universalism, 1 claim, are incom-
patihle.32 (1 have put the thesis to Hahermas in person, but he has
never ans\',rered.) Furthermore, Bourdieu perceives that the argument
leads to the dictum: "To say that there are social conditions for the
production of truth is to say that there is a politics of truth."33
It is the relative neglect of an analysis of the conditions of "know-
ledge" operative in practice that concerns me most. I cannot see how
to ensure the theoretical contribution o(the habitus without a reason-
ably detailed account of the cognizing process of social life. That is
what I meant by the problem of predication and the irrelevance of the
"body's" fluent and spontaneous aptitude.l have myself witnessed the
skill of the Greek peasant equivalent of the Yugoslav gus/ar in com-
bining the formulaic and the improvisational in songs about immedi-
ate events.
34
But that is merely a site of the paradigmatic exercise of
encultured aptitudes: it cannot replace their analysis.
I am inclined to believe that it is because he conflates the two issues
that BOllrdieu is dra" .. n to binarism in the explication of "practical
taxonomies.,,35 This is the only way to read the careful phrasing:
"The habitus continuously generates practical metaphors, that is to
say, transfer (of which the transfer of motor habits is only one ex-
ample) or, more precisely, systematic transpositions required by the
particular conditions in which the habitus is 'put into practice' ,,36
First of all, Bourdieu assigns to the habitus an active role, which can
only be a metaphor for the processes of the knowledge that belongs to
"practice" (not otherwise explained). Secondly, it leans in the direc-
tion of the old structuralism. Thirdly, it is ultimately incompatihle
with Bourdieu's insistence that the habitus is variably constituted and
reconstituted by the aggregated behavior of the apt members of a
society. "'The habitus," he says, "is not only a structuring structure,
which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a
Pierre Bourdleu: Habitus an? the Logic of PractICe . _______ ---.,;..7.;.,.7
structured structure: the principle of division into logical classes
which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product
of internalization of the division into social classcs.,,37
Clearly, the historicizing theme and the reflexive and reciprocal
process of structuring and being structured cannot support anything
like Levi-Strauss's structuralism; but there is no evidence that Bour-
dieu's adjustment does not support binarism. On the contrary, there is
ever}' evidence that Bourdieu is himself a binarist:
inevitably inscribed within the dispositions of the habitus [Bourdieu says,) is
the whole structure of the system of conditions, as it presents itself in the
experience of a life-condition occupying a particular position within that
structure. The most fundamental oppositions in the structure (highllow, rich!
poor etc.) tend to establish themselves as the fundamental structuring prin-
ciples of practices and the perception of practices.
38
Binarism constitutes Bourdieu's most pointed approach to the logic of
predication and (therefore) to the "logic of practice." But binarism
doe. .. not explain the first logic, it presupposes it; and binary distinc-
tions neither confirm hinarism nor are more perspicuous, predica-
tively, than other categorical schemes.
Bourdieu explicitly says (as he must, on his own thesis): "the
conditions associated with a particular class of conditions of existence
produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, struc-
tured, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and
representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes
without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mas-
tery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.,,39 This
confirms the sense in which Bourdieu regularly favors the theme of
fluency over the cognizing "logic" of the habitus - and the possibility
that he believes binarism relieves him of the need to go further.
The critical point is that the extensi01t of general predicates,
whether Intentional or physical, whether in accord with binarism or
not, can (so I am arguing) onl}' be explained in terms of the collective,
consensual, and historicized drift of the lebensformlich practices of
particular societies. There may be some biologically favored "disposi-
tion" toward certain classifications. Short of innatism, however, there
is no way to understand the matter in terms of the internalized aptitude
of individual "bodies" (or agents). The "aptitude" is itself a function of
the consensual validation of the diverse acts and dispositions of the
aggregated members of a society. The habitus, I should say, cannot be
the cognizing aptitude of practice: there is no such aptitude; it is rather
the running abstraction of the collective thread of the converging
f1uencies (and their "correction") of aggregated individual life. It has
_78 ___________________ ---=J-=.o:::...se::.J:p:.:.c.h _t0argolis
no criterial function of any sort. Alternatively put, the analysis of the
habitus must accord with the analysis of the "knowledge" of "real
generals." No one like Bourdieu, who favors tebensformen and his-
toricity, could come to any other finding. So the resolution of this
puzzle - remarked in an earlier tally - is one that can accommodate
the theme of "strategies" replacing "rules," but it need not restrict itself
in this way any more than in the structuralist's way.
Perhaps the point may be put thus: practice is a logical space, not a
cognizing faculty of any sort. Similarly, habitus is not the work of any
agency, but rather the abstracted chronicle of the fluent processes by
which whatever work is done is done. What specifically belongs to
cognition and intelligence in cultural space is not clarified by the
"logic of practice": it is presupposed by it. If I am right, there is
nothing in Bourdieu that comes to terms \ .... irh the microprocesses of
cognition in the world of practice. I frankly believe Bourdieu miscon-
strues the matter. He thinks of "practical knowledge" almost faculta-
tively, as providing an alternative to Aristotle's well-known contrast
(between the theoretical and the practical) and as arising as such as a
result of the cultural embodiment that habitus signifies. I accept the
notion of cultural embodiment; I deny that that gives us a sense of the
nature of the perception, judgment, or effective action that the fluency
of cultural life endlessly confirms. You may think I misread Bourdieu,
but here is his own statement:
This relation of practical knowledge is not that between a subject and an
object constituted as such and perceived as problem. Habitus being the social
embodied, it is "'at horne" in the field it inhabits, it perceives it immediately as
endowed with meaning and interest. The practical knowledge it procures
may he descrihed hy analogy with Aristotle's phronesis or, hetter, with the
orthe doxa of which Plato talks in Meno: just as the "right opinion" "falls
right," in a sense, without knowing how or why, likewise the coincidence
between dispositions and position, between the "sense of the game" and the
game, explains that the agent does , .. :hat he or she "has to do" without posing
it explicitly as a goal, below the level of calculation and even consciousness,
beneath discourse and representation. 40
Again, I say this captures beautifully the sense of the fluency of
cultural life; but it has nothing to do with the analysis of the cognizing
process that fluency is meant to qualify.
The point at stake is this: the cognizing powers of theoretical
knowledge, as in (he sciences, is similarly marked by the fluency of
habitus. Theorizing discourse is a form of "practice." There's the
reversal of Aristotle and the common discovery of Marx and Wiu-
genstein. Bourdieu speaks as if there were a certain new competence
Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus and the Logic of Practice 79
that we manifest in specifically cultural life; whereas the truth is, there
is nothing that is paradigmatically human (that is, manifest in thought
and knowledge and practice and technology) that is not a form of
cultural life. Since it would not be responsive to account for the
cognizing power of the sciences in terms said to function "below the
level of calculation and even consciousness," it cannot be responsive
to appeal to it in addressing the "logic of practice." The reason is
plain: even at "the level of calculation and ... consciousness,"/luenc)1
functions "beneath discourse and representation" - or, better, dis-
course and representation function fluently "beneath" the level at
which whatever they single out they single out.
We have no idea how, effectively, \ve are or become fluent; but our
fluency is not a distinct cognitive power. It cannot be admitted with-
out analysis. It is only the site of an extraordinary competence. There
is, in Bourdieu, no account of referential and predicative competence.
That cannot be different in theoretical and "practical" life. But Bour-
dieu speaks as if it is. It is because of that that he is attracted to
binarism. Binarism suggests that there is a certain subterraneous
cognizing competence - perhaps akin to an instinct (I admit I am
tempted to read Bourdieu thus) - that sees in the relative fixity of the
binarism of the sexes a competence to generate through that tacit
power (interacting with its environment) whatever further binary
articulations may be wanted for the form of life of this or that
society:ll I am inclined to think that Bourdieu means what he says
here - literally. He speaks of a competence that has directly absorbed
(internalized, learned) the structural or structuring powers of one's
society's habitus. That competence is not fixed by rules, it is true; it
proceeds by strategies (which are very much in accord with Wittgen-
stein's notion of knowing "how to go on"). But this itself may be
construed as rejecting an inflexible model of animal instinct and as
(merely) preferring the somewhat more flexible (but ultimately inflex-
ible) models of theorists like Tinbergen and Edward Wilson. In any
case, I cannot see that Bourdieu has gone beyond this.
If that is so, then Bourdieu has been gravely misled; first, because
hinarism is a purely formal, not a cognitively active, principle; second,
because there are neither a priori nor empirical reasons for thinking
that binarism is true; third, because the cognizing competence of
acting in accord with rules or by way of strategies is ultimately the
same; fourth, because the fluency of practical life would show the
same apparent autonomy, whether it proceeded by rules or by strate-
gies; and finally, because there is no way to equate the reporting of the
fluency of our cognitive powers and their analysis, or to infer convin-
cingly that the admission of the first obviates the need for the second.
80 Joseph Margolis
The essential clue is this. Cognitive competence of any kind is
assignable only to individual agents. Habitus signifies the collective
fluency of a form of life. For conceptual reasons, therefore, habitus
cannot be a cognitive power. Q.E.D. Nevertheless, the cognizing
powers of humans entail internalizing the forms of life of which
habitus is the abstract thread: the cognizing powers of aggregated
agents is collecti ve; that is, it is, in every individuated token, an
exercise of an ability that cannot be characterized except in collective
terms. For instance, only individual agents speak a language, but a
language is a collective possession. To speak is to utter, as an indivi-
dual, tokens of language that manifest (in an individual) the enabling
power of the habitus of a particular form of life; it is also the "effect"
(in collective life) of the thus-enabling power of speech to alter the
continuing habitus by which others (including ourselves) are able to
speak aptly at a later moment. At no point will there be a collective
agent, however. Fluency addresses the congruity between aggregated
agency and the abstracted habitus of a viahle society: it presupposes
hut does not explore the cognizing process br which it works. The
process can only be fathomed in the way in which perception and
understanding and reference and predication actually function. The
reason the matter is important is simply that the clues that the habitus
provides are regularly ignored hy epistemologies that take as their
paradigm our knowledge of the physical world. In a curious way, that
was the fault of structuralism and existentialism. Bourdieu should (I
suggest) have gone on, therefore, to account for our cognizing powers
in terms of the way the internalized culture functions in perception
and reference and predication and the like. That is missing In nearly
all epistemologies. I confess I find it missing in Bourdieu.
Notes
1 for, instance, Pierre Bourdieu, '''Fieldwork in Philosophy'" (an inter-
With Honneth, H. K,ocyba, ,and B. Schwibc, April, 1985:
Der Kampf urn dlc sybohschc Ordnung," Asthetik und Kom-
XVI, 1986), In Other W'urds: Essays tuwards a Reflexive
SOCIOlogy, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford, 1990). The interview has
appeared also as "The Struggle for Symbolic Order, n trans. J. Bleicher,
Theory, Culture, and Society, III (1968).
2 Pi,erre Analogy," Tbe Logic of Practice, trans.
Richard (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p, 210. J regard the
references t,o the Prcsocratics as confirming an important part of my
own analYSIS,
Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus and the Logic of Practice 81
3 This is the sense, for instance, of "'Fieldwork in Philosophy'," p. 9.
4 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 72.
5 Outline of a Theor)1 of Practice, p. 74.
6 Bourdieu reports his findings in just this vein, in "'Fieldwork in Philo-
sophy'," p. 8. See, also, The Logic of Practice, Introduction.
7 "Belief and the Body," The Logic of Practice p. 293n9.
8 Ibid., pp. 77-8.
9 See John Money and Anke A. Ehrdhardt, Malt & \X'omalt, Boy & Girl;
The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Concep-
tion to Maturity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
10 Pierre Bourdieu, "Belief and the Body," The Logic of Practice, pp.
68-69.
11 '''fieldwork in Philosophy'," p. 23, also, Pierre Bourdieu, "The Work of
Time," The Logic of Practice.
12 See Pierre Bourdieu, "The Kabyle House or the World Reversed," The
Logic of Practice.
13 See Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology; The
Origins, Grammm', and Future of Ideology (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1976), chs 1-2.
14 "'Fieldwork in Philosophy'," p. 9.
15 "Belief and the Body," p p. 69-70.
16 See Joseph Margolis, "Wittgenstein's 'Form of Life': A Cultural Tem-
plate for Psychology," in Michael Chapman and Roger A. Dixon (eds),
Meaning and the Groulth of Understanding; Wittgensteill's Significance
for Developmental Psychology (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1987).
17 See Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1934), ch. 4.
18 "Belief and the Body," p. 70.
19 My own resolution of (a) appears in Texts without Referents; Reconcil-
ing Science and Narrative (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), ch. 6. My
resolution of (b) appears in "The Passing of Peirce's Realism," The
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, XXIX (1993).
20 Bourdieu himself says that the "notion of habitus" is related to "an
attempt to hreak with Kantian dualism and [for instance} to reintroduce
the permanent dispositions that are constitutive of realized morality
(Sittlichkeit), as opposed to the moralism of duty," "'Fieldwork in
Philosophy'," p. 12. The only point I would reserve judgment on con-
cerns the interpretation of "permanent dispositions."
21 A summary of the argument is given in Texts without Referents, eh. 6.
22 You may find it instructive to compare the contest regarding the "prior-
ity" of body or sign, in the recent feminist discussions of the distinction
between the male and female. Sec, for instance, Judith Butler, Bodies
That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), particularly p. 31. I have
benefited, here, from Dorothea Olkowski, "Materiality and Language:
Butler's Interrogation of the History of Philosophy," Philosophy &
Social Criticism, XXIII (1997).
82 Joseph Margolis
23 The supervenience theory has been championed by Donald Davidson,
"Mental Events," "The Material Mind," Essays on EtJents and Actions
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). The supervenience theory holds that "there
cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some
mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect
without altering in some physical respect," p. 214 ("Mental Events").
For a rigorous critique, see Simon Blackburn, "Supervenience Revi-
sited," in Ian Hacking (ed.), Exercises in Analysis: Essays by Students
of Casimir Lewy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See
also, Jaegwon Kim, Supervenie7'lu and Mind: Selected Essays (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
24 Herbert Feigl had, some years ago, formulated a pertinent worry of his
regarding (what he called) the "many-many" problem: that is, that, for
any significant action (signaling, making a chess move), t h ~ are indef-
initely many physical movements that might embody that action; that,
for any particular movement, indefinitely many different actions may be
embodied in it; and that there is no rule or algorithm that could legit-
imate reliable inferences in either direction. Pertinent judgments depend
on context, intention, history, form of life. Feigl never developed the
account needed. I may add that I have heard him mention the "many -
many" problem several times, but I have not found it in his published
papers.
25 "Belief and the Body," p. 71.
26 "Belief and the Body," pp. 72-3.
27 '''Fieldwork in Philosophy'," p. 16; see also, p. 17.
28 I give an account of this range in Texts without Referents, ch. 6; in The
Flux of History and the Flux of Science (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1993); and in bzterpretation Radical Bilt Not Unruly: The
New Puzzle of the Arts and History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995).
29 See, for instance, Bourdieu, "Social Space and Symbolic Power," In
Other W'ords, particularly pp. 130-1; and "lrrcsistable Analogies."
30 Compare Pierre Bourdieu, "The Practices of Reflexive Sociology" (The
Paris Workshop), in Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An
Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 19921, for instance pp. 241-3; and Homo Academiws, trans.
Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University 1984), Postscript.
31 '''Fieldwork in Philosophy'," p. 31.
32 See Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism without Foundations: Reconciling
Realism and Relatitlism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), ch. 2.
33 "'Ficld, ... ork in Philosophy'," p. 32.
34 See "Belief and the Body," pp. 74-5.
35 See "Irresistible Analogy."
36 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1984), p. 173.
Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus and the Logic of Practice
37 Distinction, p. 170.
38 Distinction, p. 172.
83
39 Bourdieu, "Structures, Habitus, Practices," The Logic of Practice, p. 53.
40 Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, '<"fhe Purpose of Reflexive
Sociology" (The Chicago Workshop), An Invitation to Reflexil1e Socio-
logy, p. 128.
41 For a sense of the aptness of this analogy, see N. Tinbergen, The Study of
Instinct (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).